The Richmond Organization wants to assert its restrictive copyright ownership in a song with the lyrics:
Was a high wall there that tried to stop me
A sign was painted said: Private Property,
But on the back side it didn't say nothing --
[God blessed America for me.]
Woody wrote a lot of variations on the lyrics. But this verse is probably my favorite one.
And they say irony is dead... Or maybe TRO just wants parody to be.
FWIW, I'm quite certain my neighbor (well, part-of-the-world neighbor) Arlo Guthrie would have nothing to do with this copyright tomfoolery. Of course, it's not Woody heirs that own his songs, but some tenth generation corporate buyer of collections of songs from the 1930s.... who cares about the songs as much as traders in pork bellies do about pigs.
This odd conceit among some Ruby enthusiasts about Python's OOPiness is a bit annoying. The plain fact is that Python has been completely OOP since version 0.9 (the first released version), about ten years back. Even pre-beta, sitting on Guido's private machine, OOP was in the language design (I have no idea whether e.g. 'while' or 'class' were implemented first, but both were always the spec).
It's true that a few things are spelled slightly differently between Python and Ruby. If OmniVector doesn't like the double underscores, fine. That's the Python convention for many "special" methods (e.g. '__eq__()', or '__call__()' likewise). If s/he happens to like explicit 'end' statements, more power to him/her. Likewise for an implicit 'self/this/my' object in Ruby, rather than an explicitly spelled out self passed into methods (which, incidentally, *is* useful in detached methods, at times), OK.
I suppose a different bugbear is to claim that Ruby and Java aren't really OOP because they don't allow multiple inheritance. But that's silly too. Different languages make different decisions. Ruby and Java decided on single inheritance, for better or worse... it wasn't an oversight or accident.
Evolution is *not* the "change in allele frequencies over time." Or at least that's a secondary issue, historically, conceptually, and causitively. Well, on the last, allele frequency is pretty important (but still not exclusive). But evolution as a concept is firstly a question of PHENOTYPIC change, even before it's about GENOTYPIC change.
Evolution was a well known phenomenon (e.g. from the geological record) long before the work of Mendel was known. Specifically, the rather well known Darwin had no concept of an allele when he came up with the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. In fact, Darwin's approach was most certainly not the only explanation of evolution floated in 19th century biology. For example, Lamarckian mechanisms had a plausibility at the time... in fact, Lamarckian mechanisms still represent an important underexamined area of evolutionary mechanisms, for historical reasons (Lysenko etc.)--see, for example, the work of Ruth Hubbard and the role of viral insertions into the genome. So the whole allele thing is only part of one (important) mechanism, only understood relatively late in the scientific study of evolution.
Moreover, even in modern terms, mutation still exists; admittedly, the high-school text book focus on point mutations of genes is vastly overplayed. But just looking at allele frequencies misses also both the role of regulatory genes, and also ignores structural changes in chromosomes. Genes and smaller sequences migrate within and between chromosomes--this has nothing to do with alleles. Stephen Gould's work on phentotypic growth regulation in _Ontogeny and Phylogeny_ is good here, as is the tome _Structure of Evolutionary Theory_.
I'm not sure what argent means here. When I move my mouse to a corner (or press a function key, though I rarely do that since the mouse is quicker), *all* the non-hidden windows are shown in small version. Exactly how small they are depends on how many windows I have, but passing the mouse over a reduced version also shows the title in a largish font (a bunch of Terminals tend to look similar, for example, when shrunk).
I'm not sure where those minimized windows might go "full-time". I tend to make most of my application windows the full height of my 15" Powerbook screen (maybe a few pixels less), and 2/3 the screen width (leaving some room for a dock at left, and with my HDD icon poking through at top right). There's really no extra room where reduced version might live. Well... except for on the Dock, in a very reduced form... where all the open apps indeed have icons (and often a useful variation on the icon to incidate the state of the application, like iCal showing today's date, or Mail.app showing the number of new messages).
It really looks like Sun is trying to solve the same problem Apple recognized when developing Expose. But Sun's version is less elegant and harder to use (and way too caught up in physical metaphors). Expose does such a great job of letting you see exactly what apps are runnings, and easily navigating among them. Sun's Looking Glass is similar to a degree, but generally less easy to figure out at a glance, and probably harder to work with in terms of keystrokes/mouse gestures.
There's really very little to be said in favor of Jonathan A. Zdziarski's "defense". I guess it just amounts to him wanting to sell his product. Of course, I remember when CRM114 first came out, it was subject to some very dubious--or often simply incoherent--claims. It's pretty clear Zdziarski is in quite a bit over his head... not quite as bad as the amateurs who discover their own "breakthrough" encryption techniques, but tending in the same direction.
As near as I can tell (I skimmed, admittedly, I didn't read every word carefully), his defense amounts to "please don't test the different filters because..." Fill in what feature of the test MUST not be the same as the CRM114 users who get 99.95% accuracy. This is precisely the meaning of "special pleading" in rhetoric. Also the same argument about "if only he had tried the latest-and-greatest (even though we made our wild claims before that version came out, too)."
Cormack &alia make a reasonable best effort to test several tools; and as with any test, they make certain assumptions, and choose certain methodologies. Frankly, I find that a lot more useful that "just trust us, ours works best...but we can't quantify what 'works' means."
FWIW, I wrote an empirical study of different spam filters, way back shortly after the Paul Graham buzz:
I know my study is based on quite old tool versions by now. But AFAIK, it's one of the few that actually came at the comparisons from an unbiased viewpoint. Most figures are based on the "experiences" of the strongest proponents of a given tool (or occasionally from a strong detractor). I had/have no agenda for or against any particular tool, I was just curious.
My respondents apparently missed the part of my note where I indicated my doctorate is in...Philosophy.
Use your brain here; think it through...
Let me try dumbing it down as much as I possibly can, even though explaining a joke (especially a philosophical joke) kinda ruins it. The degree granted and the name on the diploma are the same as what the school sent out. But what hangs on my wall has the form of a forgery. A forgery of a true fact. And a forgery, at that, that just a moderately close inspection will reveal to be such (font & color not quite right).
For example, imagine that you you got some US currency plates (either by creating false ones, or by stealing them). Well.. you need the special paper stock to print onto. One approach forgers take is to bleach the imprint off existing bills, i.e. to print a higher denomination onto them.
But instead of printing $100s onto bleached $1s... let's say you printed forged $20s onto bleached out real $20s. Sure you don't wind up ahead in your bank balance... but there's something of conceptual art in the act (albeit, art likely to wind you up in prison).
I have a Ph.D. in Philosophy... and I fully expect they'll revoke it if I were to say something false.:-).
Ok... "true" story here: I got my doctorate degree from the once fine institution, the University of Massachusetts (no longer, thanks to our awful Republican governor... that's a different point).
Once I got the diploma itself, I did the following. I printed out my name (David Q. Mertz) in almost-but-not-quite the same Olde-English-ish font that was on the diploma from the school. I printed on white paper, rather than the beige of the school document; and used temporary tape to attach my trimmed printout onto the face of the document.
At my local copy shop, I made a color photocopy of the diploma, making sure that you could discern the color difference between the source paper stocks on a moderately close examination (but perhaps not at a passing glance). Then I sent the school diploma to my dad, who is somewhat sentimental about such things. And framed the copy in a frame, under glass... and that copy is hanging on my wall, right here in my home office.
I kinda wish, from time to time, that I wasn't a freelance at-home writer... then I could hang my framed diploma at a work place or the like. Ah well...
Mind you, I'm a USAian who loves Canada. I want to immigrate there, and get out of this awful rightwing sinkhole that I was born into.
Still, the plain fact is that most Canadians pronounce "about" as "aboot". Not *exactly* the same as what you describe as wearing on your foot ("a boot"), but quite a bit in that direction versus the mid-Atlantic "ab-ow-t".
Mr. Flibble has not only met numerous compatriats with that pronunciation, most likely he does it himself... and just doesn't hear the difference from USAian pronunciation(s). Well, for the latter, mid-Atlantic of midwest isn't quite the same as southeast, southwest, or AAVE.
Isn't it suspicious that Brown used someone else's intellectual property to create his _Samizdat_ book with? He typed the entire thing using Microsoft Word, and running on Microsoft Windows.
Why, the whole book isn't Brown's creation at all, but is just an expression of the ideas of Microsoft......oh, wait...
If ESR were to have written "I am a libertarian, BUT I believe in strong IP rights" that would be fine. I'd disagree with him on the second part, but the sentence would make sense. The way he puts it implies that he believes that it is AS a libertarian that he believes is "strong IP rights." That's just idiotically wrong. Two beliefs cannot be more in opposition than these two.
FWIW, I ain't no libertarian myself, except in the "civil libertarian" sense. That naive free market hogwash makes my skin crawl. Probably because, unlike ESR, I actually know something about history... and know that capitalism as only and everywhere existed as a subsidy of the interests of capitalists by the state (of which they form the "committe that never meets"... as my good friend puts it).
I know Raymond is right about his criticism of Ken Brown. He's nowhere near as interesting as PJ, of course, but this is an easy one. But ESR's longstanding political naivete and ranting is enormously annoying.
In the latest, we get the assertion: "I am a libertarian who believes in strong IP rights."
Does ESR have the slightest idea what the term "lbertarian" means?! I think he thinks it just means someone who obsesses about acquiring an arsenal of guns to make them feel macho.
But in reality, Libertarians are not people who support broad government-imposed monopolies!
I find this to be a well written article, especially for non-Indians who want to understand India's country-wide voting stations. The other likes India's EVMs, with some justification, I think, despite the absence of paper ballot.
However, India's EVMs are not really applicable to a US context. While the idea promoted of "make it as simple as possible" is a good one (violated by Diebold in many ways), the author seems to forget the "but no simpler" corollary. The design of the Open Voting Consortium's system (see http://openvoting.org and http://evm2003.sourceforge.net) strikes the correct compromise.
In fairness, in an Indian context, the idea of having elections with dozens of different races, each with a dozen candidates, plus a bunch of initiatives, might seem strange. But that's what we have in some US jurisdictions. Some US cities have even begun to use ranked preference voting (so far, usually scored as IRV, but maybe Condercet, Burda, Weighted, etc. someday).
The requirements for casting one vote for one MP are rather simple, and India's EVMs add no extra complexity to that.
It's something of a thrill to find my stuff as #1, using fairly meaningful terms. It's just a gimmick to do so with odd misspellings or silly word combinations. Well, also I come out well with my own name, and the names of my columns or book. But it's an ego boost when I get to be #1 on terms people would actually search for. A couple I know about:
multiple dispatch
regular expression tutorial (this one is -huge- in hits)
weightless threads
python state machine
steve martinot (not me, a guy whose book I reviewed)
"Norms Of Reaction" genotype
gnosis utilities (well, those are mine)
Well, probably a bunch of others... it's hard to know.
I'd gladly give up my password to many sites for a bar of chocolate. I'd be getting a great deal. Heck, I'll tell you all now: it's "password"... or sometimes if the sites use a dictionary check, I'll go for "password1".
A whole lot of the places I visit protect absolutely nothing of significance to me with their password. As in, maybe I can select a color scheme for a site, or similar. And for a lot of those, I know perfectly well I'll never go back to a site; I just have to do a one-time transaction. Exactly how concerned am I supposed to be that "hackers" might change my color scheme on a news website. Actually, a lot are even worse than that--like commercial newspapers (NYT and friends): I can't even change a color scheme, they just insist on me giving them demographic info. But it's a one way thing, you can't see or change it after "registration." Even if crackers -could- change how old the NYT thinks I am, why do I care about that exacty?
Opinions of security are probably harmed by the overuse of security measures where there is self-evidently no reason to have them. Casual users get in the habit of thinking passwords are just a nuisance... even when the -do- something significant.
I wrote a 2300 word article for a column on Python! I didn't write a book. Well, actually, I did write a book, but it isn't the above article (and it's not about testing frameworks). It's certainly not a good idea to think my short article is the alpha and omega of testing. But I am confident that my article -does- address a topic that some Python programmers can benefit from. And other installments of _Charming Python_ each address similarly small, but useful, topics.
FWIW, I'm the author of the referenced testing article. Though that's not really germane to the following comment.
b.foster's misguided comment gives a link to a 1999 article about problems in Python with cleaning up circular references. Well, yeah: in 1999, Python 1.5.2 could leak on circular references. It was actually less of a problem in practice than advocates of mark-and-sweep collectors tended to complain about; but it really was a limitation. That was a long time ago.
Nowadays, Python still uses references counting as its primary collection mechanism. It's a nice system: fast, deterministic, etc. (despite what you might think, refcount *really is* faster than Bohm generational; and is well-tested as such by very smart Python developers). However, the last half-decade of Python versions also perform occassional checks for orphaned objects, and cleans them up too. The "problem" pointed to is of historical interest, at most.
I don't really run it, because it's "Classic" (and because I rarely use wordprocessors anymore). But it's definitely available, and definitely runs fine on OSX (but with pre-Cocoa widgets and all that). I still like the DOS version (or even WP/Win) a bit better than the Mac, but all of them have "reveal codes", and my partner wrote her Ph.D. thesis on WP/Mac, so it's usable (I did mine on WP5.1/DOS and WP7/Win).
It seems almost SURELY true that most/. readers are Linux users. Not necessarily exclusively, but at least sometimes.
For example, I'm a Linux user: I have one home Linux box (that I maintain mostly for my SO, and occasional testing). I maintain two Linux-hosted sites. I even have access to Sourceforge as an admin of on project, which runs Linux.
I'm also a MacOSX user, probably the most time nowadays. And I'm an OS/2 user, probably now slightly less than OSX, but still 2nd most. And I'm a FreeBSD user on another box at home. I have a couple machines with rarely used BeOS partitions--still, enough to be a "user." I'm kinda-sorta a MacOS9 user (the machine with that isn't actually hooked up), and likewise an Irix user. And shame of shames, I'm even a Win98r2 user once a year, at tax time (but I sure wish TaxCut Business was available for some other OS).
How many slashdot readers really don't use Linux AT ALL?!
We already have perfectly good prototype-based programming in Python. Do a search for "metaclass programming in python" for links to my articles on this topic. You can do -everything- with Python metaclasses (which isn't to say you -should-).
But actually, prototype programming is even simpler:
new = old.__class__(init, args, here)
Just what 'old' is is determined at runtime. And if you like, you can poke around at 'obj.__bases__' to futz with inheritence.
Not having read my _Charming Python_ articles isn't really a sufficient reason to create a new programming language.
And also so dreadfully inconsistent with Apple's corporate approach (they're a hardware company). It's almost like all the endless idiots who want Apple to "commoditize its OS for x86 machines"... ain't gonna happen.
The OVC system does NOT produce paper receipts: it produces paper BALLOTS. This distinction is important, though often misunderstood.
Under OVC, the official vote is what is printed on the paper. Electronic records are the "backup" (though they can be used for quicker preliminary results, if wanted). There is no vote buying/coersion since a voter does not carry a receipt out of a polling place. If a voter smuggles out a ballot, it is ipso facto not part of the official count, so it does not show that the voter voted as printed (in fact, if she takes out her ballot, she didn't vote at all--but I suppose someone could conceivably smuggle out a spoiled ballot, though procedures will try to prevent this).
Our plan (us in the OVC) is to produce a live-CD version of the voting software. Not in time for this demo, but that's the plan. The ISO image of the software will be verified by all relevant interested parties, and the certified version will presumably be accompanied by an MD5 sum or the like.
A physical handling procedure will be in effect too, of course. No switching certified CDs with novel ones. But in principle, someone challenging the procedure can run an MD5 on the live-CD (EVMix) on an independent machine moments before it is put into the voting station.
There are lots of other security/cryptography issues that will be involved. Fortunately, we have many of the best known security experts in this field working with us: Amit Sahai, Doug Jones, David Jefferson and Avi Ruben are supportive, etc. Some of the details will be worked out post-demo; but it's unlikely there are any basic issues we do not know to think about.
Slashdot Mirror
The Richmond Organization wants to assert its restrictive copyright ownership in a song with the lyrics:
Was a high wall there that tried to stop me
A sign was painted said: Private Property,
But on the back side it didn't say nothing --
[God blessed America for me.]
Woody wrote a lot of variations on the lyrics. But this verse is probably my favorite one.
And they say irony is dead... Or maybe TRO just wants parody to be.
FWIW, I'm quite certain my neighbor (well, part-of-the-world neighbor) Arlo Guthrie would have nothing to do with this copyright tomfoolery. Of course, it's not Woody heirs that own his songs, but some tenth generation corporate buyer of collections of songs from the 1930s.... who cares about the songs as much as traders in pork bellies do about pigs.
This odd conceit among some Ruby enthusiasts about Python's OOPiness is a bit annoying. The plain fact is that Python has been completely OOP since version 0.9 (the first released version), about ten years back. Even pre-beta, sitting on Guido's private machine, OOP was in the language design (I have no idea whether e.g. 'while' or 'class' were implemented first, but both were always the spec).
It's true that a few things are spelled slightly differently between Python and Ruby. If OmniVector doesn't like the double underscores, fine. That's the Python convention for many "special" methods (e.g. '__eq__()', or '__call__()' likewise). If s/he happens to like explicit 'end' statements, more power to him/her. Likewise for an implicit 'self/this/my' object in Ruby, rather than an explicitly spelled out self passed into methods (which, incidentally, *is* useful in detached methods, at times), OK.
I suppose a different bugbear is to claim that Ruby and Java aren't really OOP because they don't allow multiple inheritance. But that's silly too. Different languages make different decisions. Ruby and Java decided on single inheritance, for better or worse... it wasn't an oversight or accident.
Evolution is *not* the "change in allele frequencies over time." Or at least that's a secondary issue, historically, conceptually, and causitively. Well, on the last, allele frequency is pretty important (but still not exclusive). But evolution as a concept is firstly a question of PHENOTYPIC change, even before it's about GENOTYPIC change.
Evolution was a well known phenomenon (e.g. from the geological record) long before the work of Mendel was known. Specifically, the rather well known Darwin had no concept of an allele when he came up with the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. In fact, Darwin's approach was most certainly not the only explanation of evolution floated in 19th century biology. For example, Lamarckian mechanisms had a plausibility at the time... in fact, Lamarckian mechanisms still represent an important underexamined area of evolutionary mechanisms, for historical reasons (Lysenko etc.)--see, for example, the work of Ruth Hubbard and the role of viral insertions into the genome. So the whole allele thing is only part of one (important) mechanism, only understood relatively late in the scientific study of evolution.
Moreover, even in modern terms, mutation still exists; admittedly, the high-school text book focus on point mutations of genes is vastly overplayed. But just looking at allele frequencies misses also both the role of regulatory genes, and also ignores structural changes in chromosomes. Genes and smaller sequences migrate within and between chromosomes--this has nothing to do with alleles. Stephen Gould's work on phentotypic growth regulation in _Ontogeny and Phylogeny_ is good here, as is the tome _Structure of Evolutionary Theory_.
I'm not sure what argent means here. When I move my mouse to a corner (or press a function key, though I rarely do that since the mouse is quicker), *all* the non-hidden windows are shown in small version. Exactly how small they are depends on how many windows I have, but passing the mouse over a reduced version also shows the title in a largish font (a bunch of Terminals tend to look similar, for example, when shrunk).
I'm not sure where those minimized windows might go "full-time". I tend to make most of my application windows the full height of my 15" Powerbook screen (maybe a few pixels less), and 2/3 the screen width (leaving some room for a dock at left, and with my HDD icon poking through at top right). There's really no extra room where reduced version might live. Well... except for on the Dock, in a very reduced form... where all the open apps indeed have icons (and often a useful variation on the icon to incidate the state of the application, like iCal showing today's date, or Mail.app showing the number of new messages).
It really looks like Sun is trying to solve the same problem Apple recognized when developing Expose. But Sun's version is less elegant and harder to use (and way too caught up in physical metaphors). Expose does such a great job of letting you see exactly what apps are runnings, and easily navigating among them. Sun's Looking Glass is similar to a degree, but generally less easy to figure out at a glance, and probably harder to work with in terms of keystrokes/mouse gestures.
There's really very little to be said in favor of Jonathan A. Zdziarski's "defense". I guess it just amounts to him wanting to sell his product. Of course, I remember when CRM114 first came out, it was subject to some very dubious--or often simply incoherent--claims. It's pretty clear Zdziarski is in quite a bit over his head... not quite as bad as the amateurs who discover their own "breakthrough" encryption techniques, but tending in the same direction.
As near as I can tell (I skimmed, admittedly, I didn't read every word carefully), his defense amounts to "please don't test the different filters because..." Fill in what feature of the test MUST not be the same as the CRM114 users who get 99.95% accuracy. This is precisely the meaning of "special pleading" in rhetoric. Also the same argument about "if only he had tried the latest-and-greatest (even though we made our wild claims before that version came out, too)."
Cormack &alia make a reasonable best effort to test several tools; and as with any test, they make certain assumptions, and choose certain methodologies. Frankly, I find that a lot more useful that "just trust us, ours works best...but we can't quantify what 'works' means."
FWIW, I wrote an empirical study of different spam filters, way back shortly after the Paul Graham buzz:
I know my study is based on quite old tool versions by now. But AFAIK, it's one of the few that actually came at the comparisons from an unbiased viewpoint. Most figures are based on the "experiences" of the strongest proponents of a given tool (or occasionally from a strong detractor). I had/have no agenda for or against any particular tool, I was just curious.
Not really. I'm sure I could use more money, but try this:
2
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22david+mertz%2
I think that's not quite what you'd call "unemployed."
My respondents apparently missed the part of my note where I indicated my doctorate is in ...Philosophy.
Use your brain here; think it through...
Let me try dumbing it down as much as I possibly can, even though explaining a joke (especially a philosophical joke) kinda ruins it. The degree granted and the name on the diploma are the same as what the school sent out. But what hangs on my wall has the form of a forgery. A forgery of a true fact. And a forgery, at that, that just a moderately close inspection will reveal to be such (font & color not quite right).
For example, imagine that you you got some US currency plates (either by creating false ones, or by stealing them). Well.. you need the special paper stock to print onto. One approach forgers take is to bleach the imprint off existing bills, i.e. to print a higher denomination onto them.
But instead of printing $100s onto bleached $1s... let's say you printed forged $20s onto bleached out real $20s. Sure you don't wind up ahead in your bank balance... but there's something of conceptual art in the act (albeit, art likely to wind you up in prison).
I won't go to prison for my joke, FWIW.
I have a Ph.D. in Philosophy... and I fully expect they'll revoke it if I were to say something false. :-).
Ok... "true" story here: I got my doctorate degree from the once fine institution, the University of Massachusetts (no longer, thanks to our awful Republican governor... that's a different point).
Once I got the diploma itself, I did the following. I printed out my name (David Q. Mertz) in almost-but-not-quite the same Olde-English-ish font that was on the diploma from the school. I printed on white paper, rather than the beige of the school document; and used temporary tape to attach my trimmed printout onto the face of the document.
At my local copy shop, I made a color photocopy of the diploma, making sure that you could discern the color difference between the source paper stocks on a moderately close examination (but perhaps not at a passing glance). Then I sent the school diploma to my dad, who is somewhat sentimental about such things. And framed the copy in a frame, under glass... and that copy is hanging on my wall, right here in my home office.
I kinda wish, from time to time, that I wasn't a freelance at-home writer... then I could hang my framed diploma at a work place or the like. Ah well...
Mind you, I'm a USAian who loves Canada. I want to immigrate there, and get out of this awful rightwing sinkhole that I was born into.
Still, the plain fact is that most Canadians pronounce "about" as "aboot". Not *exactly* the same as what you describe as wearing on your foot ("a boot"), but quite a bit in that direction versus the mid-Atlantic "ab-ow-t".
Mr. Flibble has not only met numerous compatriats with that pronunciation, most likely he does it himself... and just doesn't hear the difference from USAian pronunciation(s). Well, for the latter, mid-Atlantic of midwest isn't quite the same as southeast, southwest, or AAVE.
Isn't it suspicious that Brown used someone else's intellectual property to create his _Samizdat_ book with? He typed the entire thing using Microsoft Word, and running on Microsoft Windows.
...oh, wait...
Why, the whole book isn't Brown's creation at all, but is just an expression of the ideas of Microsoft...
One message I've long put in my signatures is the following. This is one of several randomly selected ones:
The opinions expressed here must be those of my employer...
Surely you don't think that *I* believe them!
Read!
If ESR were to have written "I am a libertarian, BUT I believe in strong IP rights" that would be fine. I'd disagree with him on the second part, but the sentence would make sense. The way he puts it implies that he believes that it is AS a libertarian that he believes is "strong IP rights." That's just idiotically wrong. Two beliefs cannot be more in opposition than these two.
FWIW, I ain't no libertarian myself, except in the "civil libertarian" sense. That naive free market hogwash makes my skin crawl. Probably because, unlike ESR, I actually know something about history... and know that capitalism as only and everywhere existed as a subsidy of the interests of capitalists by the state (of which they form the "committe that never meets"... as my good friend puts it).
I know Raymond is right about his criticism of Ken Brown. He's nowhere near as interesting as PJ, of course, but this is an easy one. But ESR's longstanding political naivete and ranting is enormously annoying.
In the latest, we get the assertion: "I am a libertarian who believes in strong IP rights."
Does ESR have the slightest idea what the term "lbertarian" means?! I think he thinks it just means someone who obsesses about acquiring an arsenal of guns to make them feel macho.
But in reality, Libertarians are not people who support broad government-imposed monopolies!
I find this to be a well written article, especially for non-Indians who want to understand India's country-wide voting stations. The other likes India's EVMs, with some justification, I think, despite the absence of paper ballot.
However, India's EVMs are not really applicable to a US context. While the idea promoted of "make it as simple as possible" is a good one (violated by Diebold in many ways), the author seems to forget the "but no simpler" corollary. The design of the Open Voting Consortium's system (see http://openvoting.org and http://evm2003.sourceforge.net) strikes the correct compromise.
In fairness, in an Indian context, the idea of having elections with dozens of different races, each with a dozen candidates, plus a bunch of initiatives, might seem strange. But that's what we have in some US jurisdictions. Some US cities have even begun to use ranked preference voting (so far, usually scored as IRV, but maybe Condercet, Burda, Weighted, etc. someday).
The requirements for casting one vote for one MP are rather simple, and India's EVMs add no extra complexity to that.
It's something of a thrill to find my stuff as #1, using fairly meaningful terms. It's just a gimmick to do so with odd misspellings or silly word combinations. Well, also I come out well with my own name, and the names of my columns or book. But it's an ego boost when I get to be #1 on terms people would actually search for. A couple I know about:
multiple dispatch
regular expression tutorial (this one is -huge- in hits)
weightless threads
python state machine
steve martinot (not me, a guy whose book I reviewed)
"Norms Of Reaction" genotype
gnosis utilities (well, those are mine)
Well, probably a bunch of others... it's hard to know.
I'd gladly give up my password to many sites for a bar of chocolate. I'd be getting a great deal. Heck, I'll tell you all now: it's "password"... or sometimes if the sites use a dictionary check, I'll go for "password1".
A whole lot of the places I visit protect absolutely nothing of significance to me with their password. As in, maybe I can select a color scheme for a site, or similar. And for a lot of those, I know perfectly well I'll never go back to a site; I just have to do a one-time transaction. Exactly how concerned am I supposed to be that "hackers" might change my color scheme on a news website. Actually, a lot are even worse than that--like commercial newspapers (NYT and friends): I can't even change a color scheme, they just insist on me giving them demographic info. But it's a one way thing, you can't see or change it after "registration." Even if crackers -could- change how old the NYT thinks I am, why do I care about that exacty?
Opinions of security are probably harmed by the overuse of security measures where there is self-evidently no reason to have them. Casual users get in the habit of thinking passwords are just a nuisance... even when the -do- something significant.
How is the parent "insightful"?!
I wrote a 2300 word article for a column on Python! I didn't write a book. Well, actually, I did write a book, but it isn't the above article (and it's not about testing frameworks). It's certainly not a good idea to think my short article is the alpha and omega of testing. But I am confident that my article -does- address a topic that some Python programmers can benefit from. And other installments of _Charming Python_ each address similarly small, but useful, topics.
FWIW, I'm the author of the referenced testing article. Though that's not really germane to the following comment.
b.foster's misguided comment gives a link to a 1999 article about problems in Python with cleaning up circular references. Well, yeah: in 1999, Python 1.5.2 could leak on circular references. It was actually less of a problem in practice than advocates of mark-and-sweep collectors tended to complain about; but it really was a limitation. That was a long time ago.
Nowadays, Python still uses references counting as its primary collection mechanism. It's a nice system: fast, deterministic, etc. (despite what you might think, refcount *really is* faster than Bohm generational; and is well-tested as such by very smart Python developers). However, the last half-decade of Python versions also perform occassional checks for orphaned objects, and cleans them up too. The "problem" pointed to is of historical interest, at most.
I downloaded WP3.5e/Mac less than a month ago.
I don't really run it, because it's "Classic" (and because I rarely use wordprocessors anymore). But it's definitely available, and definitely runs fine on OSX (but with pre-Cocoa widgets and all that). I still like the DOS version (or even WP/Win) a bit better than the Mac, but all of them have "reveal codes", and my partner wrote her Ph.D. thesis on WP/Mac, so it's usable (I did mine on WP5.1/DOS and WP7/Win).
It seems almost SURELY true that most /. readers are Linux users. Not necessarily exclusively, but at least sometimes.
For example, I'm a Linux user: I have one home Linux box (that I maintain mostly for my SO, and occasional testing). I maintain two Linux-hosted sites. I even have access to Sourceforge as an admin of on project, which runs Linux.
I'm also a MacOSX user, probably the most time nowadays. And I'm an OS/2 user, probably now slightly less than OSX, but still 2nd most. And I'm a FreeBSD user on another box at home. I have a couple machines with rarely used BeOS partitions--still, enough to be a "user." I'm kinda-sorta a MacOS9 user (the machine with that isn't actually hooked up), and likewise an Irix user. And shame of shames, I'm even a Win98r2 user once a year, at tax time (but I sure wish TaxCut Business was available for some other OS).
How many slashdot readers really don't use Linux AT ALL?!
We already have perfectly good prototype-based programming in Python. Do a search for "metaclass programming in python" for links to my articles on this topic. You can do -everything- with Python metaclasses (which isn't to say you -should-).
But actually, prototype programming is even simpler:
new = old.__class__(init, args, here)
Just what 'old' is is determined at runtime. And if you like, you can poke around at 'obj.__bases__' to futz with inheritence.
Not having read my _Charming Python_ articles isn't really a sufficient reason to create a new programming language.
To emulate the _Simpsons_' "comic book guy".
And also so dreadfully inconsistent with Apple's corporate approach (they're a hardware company). It's almost like all the endless idiots who want Apple to "commoditize its OS for x86 machines"... ain't gonna happen.
The OVC system does NOT produce paper receipts: it produces paper BALLOTS. This distinction is important, though often misunderstood.
Under OVC, the official vote is what is printed on the paper. Electronic records are the "backup" (though they can be used for quicker preliminary results, if wanted). There is no vote buying/coersion since a voter does not carry a receipt out of a polling place. If a voter smuggles out a ballot, it is ipso facto not part of the official count, so it does not show that the voter voted as printed (in fact, if she takes out her ballot, she didn't vote at all--but I suppose someone could conceivably smuggle out a spoiled ballot, though procedures will try to prevent this).
Our plan (us in the OVC) is to produce a live-CD version of the voting software. Not in time for this demo, but that's the plan. The ISO image of the software will be verified by all relevant interested parties, and the certified version will presumably be accompanied by an MD5 sum or the like.
A physical handling procedure will be in effect too, of course. No switching certified CDs with novel ones. But in principle, someone challenging the procedure can run an MD5 on the live-CD (EVMix) on an independent machine moments before it is put into the voting station.
There are lots of other security/cryptography issues that will be involved. Fortunately, we have many of the best known security experts in this field working with us: Amit Sahai, Doug Jones, David Jefferson and Avi Ruben are supportive, etc. Some of the details will be worked out post-demo; but it's unlikely there are any basic issues we do not know to think about.